


Shaky Hands

by Merkwerkee



Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [1]
Category: Masters of the Metaverse
Genre: Whumptober 2019, during his time in the Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22854814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Being bombed makes finishing a mission rather difficult
Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643020





	Shaky Hands

Sergeant Bruno Hamilton checked the few bushes he’d tethered together to cover the mouth of the cave, and waited for the rain to stop.

He and three other men - Cpl Ben Willkins, PFC Kyle McKlevin, and PFC Werner van Kemseke - had been dispatched to this particular piece of godforsaken jungle with a very simple mission; locate the Pathet Lao base, extract the high-value target, and fall back to the handoff point where a detachment from the Royal Lao Army would take the target from there. No witnesses.

Simple enough on paper, but they’d been delayed in transit and now the area was under heavy bombardment from the Air Force.

The base itself was unlikely to be hit; Bruno had to admit that whoever had chosen the location had chosen well, a small slot canyon leading into a narrow valley sheltered on three sides by sharply angled cliffs. It’d take an extremely lucky bombardier to plant a bomb in there, and of course the Air Force was going for quantity over actually aiming. But he and his men had barely been in the area a day when the first whistle dropped and they’d been forced to take cover themselves.

Fortunately, the same geography that sheltered the base also lent itself to protecting himself and his team; they’d managed to find a small overhang just deep enough to maybe be called a cave on a good day, and had concealed it and themselves from prying eyes as best they could. That had been four days ago, and there hadn’t been a long enough gap between bombings since to make infiltration of the base feasible.

PFC McKlevin wasn’t taking it well; it wasn’t his first mission, not with Bruno and not with IMAF, but you wouldn’t know it from the obsessive way he cleaned his weapons. And then Willkins’ weapons. And van Kamseke’s weapons. He’d tried to do Bruno’s as well but Bruno wasn’t about to let someone else disassemble his weapons in a combat zone so McKlevin had cleaned his weapons again. And again.

Bruno understood, to a point, but the cave was only keeping the bombs off their heads and if they had been discovered a gun stripped for cleaning would do nobody any good; an idea he’d driven home as hard as he could when yelling was Not An Option. The kid had stopped cleaning his guns anyway, and started sharpening his knife.

That had been a day and three bombing runs ago, and the only thing keeping the others from strangling McKlevin was the fact that the bombings had started moving off; the flyboys had finally gotten orders to move to a new sector, nearest any of them could tell, and this latest bombing was the furthest away yet. It was time.

Bruno let the bushes go and turned to the others several long minutes after the last rumble had stopped. They had to move fast, to take advantage of any gaps in perimeter defenses the bombs might have made. In less than ten minutes their gear was stowed and the traces of their time spent here in the cave minimized; they moved out silently, the quiet stillness of the landscape after the bombs had fallen engendering the necessity of hand signals in place of the spoken word.

Their chosen route was, miraculously, still passable - though almost unrecognizable, the fallen bombs having created a scene that looked more like the surface of the moon than any kind of terrestrial habitat. They crept through craters that still stank of the explosives that had created them - though the wind had whipped away most of the chemical stink from the older ones. The grass rustled in the wind, but none of whatever animals were left were stirring. Dirt crumbled away at the edge of the impacts, and made footing tricky; for all that, they moved with practiced swiftness.

“Sarge.”

McKlevin’s voice wasn’t particularly loud, but the absence of sound turned it almost into a shout. Bruno looked around, a reprimand at the ready, but didn’t see the guy. Willkins and van Kemseke he marked mentally, both having frozen at the unexpected noise, but McKlevin was nowhere to be seen. Frowning, Bruno gestured for the others to move up to the shelter offered by a meager treeline a hundred yards in front of them, while he himself began making his way over to where McKlevin’s voice had come from.

As he reached the lip of one of the impact craters, he froze. The crater was deeper than it had first appeared, and McKLevin was laid out flat along the bottom. A crumbled edge told the story of uncertain footing, and the UXO pressed up against McKlevin’s side was enough to make Bruno’s blood run cold.

“Can you move?” He asked quietly, and McKlevin nodded. “I’m not hurt, sir. But…” he trailed off and Bruno’s mouth set in a grim line. If he moved and the bomb exploded, that would give away their position and potentially wipe out the team. If he didn’t move….Bruno thought rapidly and all the scenarios he could imagine were bad. He looked down, and noticed distantly that the kid’s hands were clenched so tightly to his gun they were shaking.

Making up his mind, Bruno slipped off his pack and set his weapon down before scooting carefully into the crater with McKlevin. “Sarge!” he hissed, dismay written on his face even with the whites showing all the way around his eyes. Bruno cut him off with a glare before puling out his knife and gently teasing the casing open on the bomb.

Ignoring the full-body tremors now running down McKlevin’s back, he very, very gently began moving the wires around inside the casing. Fortunately for Bruno, he was at least passingly familiar with most American-made explosives and this bomb was no exception. A brief inspection was enough to tell him the triggers had been jarred loose by the impact with the ground instead of striking true, and a few cuts of his knife later had both the triggers and the backups set on the ground next to him.

He breathed a sigh of relief and felt McKlevin go boneless beneath him. Shuflling back on his knees, he offered the younger man a hand up to a sitting position. Keeping hold of the PFC’s hand just a moment longer than necessary, Bruno stared deep into his eyes.

“Watch your goddam step, McKlevin.”


End file.
